for those who love good prose...
Suprose aims to encourage and support literature, authors, books and audiences of SA prose. Think of this as a watering hole where conversations begin and friendships develop.

What is Suprose?

Welcome to Suprose.

Why Su-prose? "Su" in Sanskrit is a prefix for "good". This is a place where we will discuss and analyze prose (with a South Asian Connection) - that which is good, awesome, excellent, and maybe rant about prose that could be better.

Whether you love prose, are a prose expert, or want to learn more about prose, or to put it simply want to have anything to do with prose, this blog is for you.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing,” said Joseph Heller. Let that serve as comfort. The act of piling words one on top the next so they make sense, so that they best get across what they’re meant to express, proves a challenge even for the people for whom writing is their main endeavor.

Who hasn’t felt that specific blank-screen dread, the cruel tease of the cursor blink? Who hasn’t held pen poised to pad and not spilled any ink  or worse, spilled ink with all the wrong words, scribbling out sentences to leave black pits in the paper? Who hasn’t clenched their fists and clutched their skulls and wondered why won’t the words just come? And it’s not just novelists angsting over chapter 22. It’s not just poets struggling to find the right eight words to distill existence in 14 lines. An e-mail, an essay, a memo. A blog post, a tweet, a text. Getting the words right can be hard.

We tend to think great writers are born that way. That Herman Melville popped out of Mama Melville with lines like “But what puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted” already instilled within him somewhere, just waiting for the right time to emerge. Or Hemingway, seated in his first-grade class, musing on lean prose and the possibility of a Nick Adams. Alternately, great writing can seem a sort of magic  a lightening blast of inspiration, a flash of genius. Neither is all the way true.

The question then: is it possible to learn how to make it easier? Is it possible to learn how to do it better? The question is: can writing be taught?

The answer, it seems, is yes, but it’s got less to do with writing and more to do with work. Below, some discussion from some area teachers of writing  both of the creative bent and the more practical  about how it’s possible to become a better writer, whether your goal is Next Great American Novelist or simply to craft better e-mails to your bosses.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Lives unfold after an adoption in ‘Secret Daughter’

As Indian literature in English has flourished in recent years, a subgenre of Indian-American literature has emerged alongside it. Written largely by authors of Indian descent who live in the United States, books like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake,’’ Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss,’’ and Tania James’s “Atlas of Unknowns’’ spotlight Indian immigrants or move back and forth between India and the United States. The latest contribution to this sub-genre, Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s first novel, “Secret Daughter,’’ offers a new bridge between the two countries: adoption. The story of Asha, her Indian birth mother, and her American adoptive mother, “Secret Daughter’’ adds a fraught take on motherhood to familiar themes of alienation and cultural identity.

SECRET DAUGHTERBy Shilpi Somaya Gowda

William Morrow, 352 pp., $23.99

When Kavita gives birth to her first daughter in a small town in India, her husband immediately takes the baby away to be killed. Kavita refuses to let her second pregnancy come to the same end. When the baby is another girl, she sneaks away to Bombay and leaves the infant Usha at an orphanage. Across a continent and ocean, San Francisco doctor Somer Whitman discovers she is in early menopause and decides to adopt from India where her husband grew up. The baby they bring home to California is Usha who, in a paperwork error, has been renamed Asha.

“Secret Daughter’’ moves back and forth between the unfolding lives of Kavita, Somer, and Asha. Kavita finally satisfies her husband by giving birth to a son, Vijay, though she continues to yearn for her lost daughter. To make a better life for Vijay, the family moves to Bombay where their terrifying slum experiences and slow climb into a reasonable life and living are one of the book’s most interesting elements. Kavita is a sympathetic character, convincing in both her acceptance of her fate and her unceasing desire for her daughter — she returns repeatedly to the orphanage where she left the baby, searching for a recognizable child, unaware that she is growing up on the other side of the world.

Somer is more of a stock character — the professional woman undone by infertility and motherhood — but adoption adds a twist. Thoroughly alienated by India, she refuses to return after the adoption and largely banishes Indian culture from her family’s life, inadvertently broadening the distance she feels from both the child she desperately loves and, increasingly, her husband (it is somewhat hard to believe that a character as intelligent as Somer can’t see the consequences of her actions, but perhaps that is Gowda’s point).

Asha’s own sense of alienation is palpable from childhood, though she doesn’t fully realize what she’s missing until she connects with her Indian heritage in college. When she receives a journalism fellowship to Bombay, where she researches the lives of slum children and lives with her grandmother, the novel’s characters and thematic strands inevitably — and slightly predictably — come together.

“Secret Daughter’’ is an engaging read, with its quick shifts between characters and rapid movement through 20 years of familial narrative. Some plot developments can be spotted a mile away — when Kavita’s son starts bringing home lots of money, it is clear that he is up to no good — but Gowda resolutely refuses to tie up all her loose ends, keeping the novel from settling into banality.

If motherhood is the primary interest of “Secret Daughter,’’ its success is finally embodied in Sarla, Asha’s grandmother, who foregrounds the power of nurturance above and beyond either blood or legal ties. For Kavita and Somer, letting their daughter go becomes the ultimate act of nurturance, allowing Asha, in the end, to claim her own identity.

Rebecca Steinitz is a writer, editor, and writing coach who lives in Arlington.